In February a group of renowned international scientists earnestly concluded that global warming is ‘unequivocal,’ greenhouse gases are the smoking gun, and humankind’s fingerprints are all over it. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report, while sobering, hardly qualifies as a news flash in the era of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Years before scientists inched deliberately toward what many already viewed as conventional wisdom, a concerned cadre of University of Miami administrators, students, and faculty had connected the dots. And they didn’t like what the dots had revealed.

As early as 2005, a “Green U” task force was examining how the University could operate and educate in ways that are kinder and gentler to the Earth. With apologies to Kermit the Frog, those behind the Green U initiative quickly discovered it isn’t easy being green. Undaunted, the Green U adherents continued to proselytize. Their gospel is gaining traction, to the point where the task force has grown from three people to 40, students are pursuing recycling programs, and President Donna E. Shalala proudly touts her ownership of a hybrid SUV. There’s still a ways to go, but having Miami Mayor Manny Diaz, J.D. ’80, single out the new Clinical Research Building at the Miller School of Medicine as the city’s first “green” high-rise is a good start.

The University’s impetus for being greener comes from both proactive students, who’d like to have a nice planet to call home, as well as from campus officials who strive to make the institution a good neighbor locally and globally. In 2005 the University began exploring a partnership with Green Seal, a nonprofit organization that helps institutions become eco-friendly. Vice president for business services Alan Fish, who coined the Green U term, appointed Ken Capezzuto, M.S. ’05, director of the Office of Environmental Health and Safety and the guy who ensures that Green U has a daily pulse. A hazardous materials specialist, Capezzuto had spent more than a decade making sure that xylene, sulfuric acid, and other potent byproducts of University research stayed out of Miami-Dade County landfills.

So how does one deal with the environmental sustainability of an entity that has more than 10,000 students, fleets of vehicles, five campuses, and hundreds of buildings spread over 500 acres? That’s the question that Green Seal is helping the University answer.

The University of Miami is the first academic client for Green Seal, which has worked with the World Bank, the Pentagon, and the State of Pennsylvania to ramp up their eco-friendly quotients. After the University signed a $68,000 contract, Green Seal began assessing three of four campuses. The sparsely populated, 136-acre South Campus, located ten miles south of Coral Gables, was left out of the mix.

A Green Seal executive summary contained a list of recommendations, ranging from establishing a green purchasing policy to minimizing the amount of time unoccupied buildings keep their thermostats below 80 degrees. The University is pursuing many initiatives as a result of the Green U/Green Seal linkage, such as buying energy-efficient copiers that have recyclable toner cartridges.

The 40-member Green U task force has come up with a few innovations of its own, like a pilot program to run three of the University’s 23 shuttle buses on cleaner-burning biodiesel fuel. If that trial is successful, the entire fleet will be converted to biodiesel, says Sandra Redway, M.A.L.S. ’01, director of business services. Some UM Police Department officers are now cruising the Coral Gables campus on Segways, two-wheel contraptions with police sirens and lights that operate on battery power instead of gasoline. The University also extends a 50 percent discount on parking permits to students, faculty, and staff owning hybrid vehicles powered by a combination of electricity and gasoline.

While hybrids as of yet are not abundant in University parking garages, students are driving the green initiative in other ways. In 2005 Student Government passed a resolution endorsing Green U. And last year a new student organization, Sustainable U, was formed to draw attention to eco-friendly practices through recycling programs, research activities, guest speakers, and workshops.

“Sustainable U’s basic mission is to raise awareness and really just educate the surrounding community about a lifestyle that sustains, rather than depletes, the environment,” says Josh Braunstein, a senior business major who helped create Sustainable U. The idea grew out of an extra-credit assignment from Pamela Reid, Ph.D. ’85, associate professor of marine geology and geophysics, in a class for non-science majors called Introduction to Oceanography.

“The goals were to investigate what other schools were doing with regard to sustainability and what was being done at UM and to come up with a vision for what the students would like to see done here,” says Reid, who is the faculty advisor for Sustainable U. “Last summer Josh Braunstein wrote to tell me that the class changed his life.”

Braunstein, who plans to do volunteer environmental work in Uganda this summer prior to earning a master’s degree in environmental policy and sustainable development, worked with fellow students this year to champion the University’s signing of the Talloires Declaration. This spring President Shalala joined more than 300 university presidents and chancellors worldwide who have signed this ten-point action plan for incorporating sustainability and environmental literacy in their institution’s teaching, research, operations, and outreach. At the prompting of Sustainable U, the University also joined The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.

“The students understand that sustainability is the net sum of the environment plus the economy,” Reid says. “Earth is in an unprecedented crisis, and this is an issue that involves everyone, not just scientists studying the environment.”

Another student group, Earth Alert, has helped place more recycling bins around the Coral Gables campus, launched a battery-recycling initiative in the residential colleges, and organized local beach and park cleanups. This semester Earth Alert rallied students for RecycleMania, a ten-week recycling competition against 200 other colleges and universities.

“One of the things that we’ve done is institute competitions to really encourage students to participate,” says Earth Alert president Lara Polansky, a seniormajoring in biology and environmental science and policy.

The powerhouse group Greenpeace also has an active student chapter on campus. “As opposed to Earth Alert, we have a more political agenda,” says Jarret Salm, Greenpeace president and a geography and ecosystem science and policy major. Salm describes a successful campaign his group waged with grass roots partner Forest Ethics against Victoria’s Secret.

“They send out over a million catalogs a day, which is enough for every man, woman, and child in America to have one,” Salm says.

As a result of the Greenpeace campaign, Victoria’s Secret agreed that the pulp for its catalog paper will not come from endangered forests

Of the 40 members Green U had at the beginning of the spring semester this year, Capezzuto estimates that 70 percent were UM staff and administrators, 20 percent students, and 10 percent faculty. Associate professor of architecture Denis Hector is a longtime Green U proponent who’s excited about the University’s desire to erect more green buildings.

“The building industry as a whole is one of the major consumers of energy as well as a producer of greenhouse gases,” Hector says. “And that’s a challenge for architects and builders to solve in the next ten years.”

The School of Architecture is doing its part by cosponsoring a green-building lecture series and symposia in conjunction with the U.S. Green Building Council, a nonprofit organization dedicated to sustainable building design and construction.

Having a long-term approach, Fish says, is important if sustainability is to prevail at the University of Miami. It also doesn’t hurt when people like UM trustee Leonard Abess and his wife, Jayne, endow UM with a $5 million naming gift for the Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy. The center was formed in 2002 to educate the next generation of environmental scientists, policy-makers, managers, and planners on bridging the gap between science and policy.

In the meantime, the Green U team will keep fighting for sustainability one unglamorous battle at a time, like a recent contract signed with a carpet company whose product is not only greener and totally recyclable but also cheaper. Given that cost will always be an important factor for the Green U champions, cheap is good. But when you’re a college student concerned about the health of your planet, there’s much more at stake than dollar signs.

“As Al Gore put it, we are the generation of the future, and these problems are going to be our problems,” Polansky says. “More and more I feel as if college students are behind the green movement. There’s really a shift going on.”

Blair S. Walker is a novelist and freelance writer in Miami, Florida.